Frescobaldi

If you are not familiar with LilyPond, then I must briefly tell you that it is a free, cross-platform, music notation application that you can use to create sheet music. The main idea is that you should be able to produce elegant sheet music on the computer; LilyPond is the ideal tool for that.

Frescobaldi was developed to work hand in hand with the aforementioned music notation tool LilyPond. Frescobaldi allows you to edit LilyPond sheet music. And just like LilyPond, Frescobaldi is a free software released under a GNU General Public License.

Frescobaldi runs on all major platforms: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux. The Frescobaldi installer for Windows is little over 12MB in size. Download it, run it, and you will be presented with a setup wizard that will help you quickly install Frescobaldi onto your Windows-powered machine. It must be mentioned here that the setup wizard will ask to associate Frescobaldi with .ly (LilyPond) files.

The Frescobaldi interface is made up of three panels. The one in the upper left presents info on the .ly file you loaded. The one in the upper right is the Music View panel and the one in the bottom left is the LilyPond Log Panel. At the top there’s a traditional File Menu and a handy toolbar. It must be mentioned that you can change the interface’s visual style from the Preferences menu.

As mentioned above, Frescobaldi is a free tool you can use to edit LilyPond sheet music. To better put things in perspective, here’s a quick look at its main features: text editor with syntax highlighting and automatic completion; MIDI player to listen to files generated with LilyPond; handy Music view; very useful Score Wizard that will help you quickly create music scores; lots of useful documentation; support for multiple languages is provided.

Frescobaldi is free, it runs on all major platforms, it comes with an intuitive interface, and it works as advertised.